Don't know why you don't like this. Whenever I see this in the story summary, I know right away that I don't have to waste my time seeing if the story is something I want to read. I immediately know it's piece of crap. I just move right on to the next. It's a wonderful time saver!

 

There are a few that are at the very least enjoyable, but most fall flat either due to UNSC roflstomping reapers or just regurgitating ME2 with Chief + Cortana tagging along.

Wish more authors tried to actually work in characters and upping the threats/challenges they'd face appropriately instead of just stapling together everything with zero thought involved.

 

that's my pet peeve

 

I have know idea what your talking about.

 

she exclaimed angrily, huffing and glaring at James.

 

It buuuurrrnnnsss! :fire

And now for something completely different.

Handsome/Hansom

Handsome: Most commonly used as an adjective to describe something as being attractive. In this capacity, it usually refers to masculine beauty, though it IS occasionally used to refer to women (sometimes as a backhanded compliment).

Hansom: As in "Hansom cab," a type of horse-drawn carriage, patented by Joseph Hansom.

Obviously, you should never describe someone's looks as being "hansom." No, not even horse-faced people. Look, just because your spellchecker agrees that "hansom" is a word, doesn't mean it's the word you're looking for.

Spellchecker is like someone's profile picture, it might give you some idea of what's really going on, but applying some research and good judgment is still advisable.
---

Disdain/Distain

Fuck off, cretin.
I feel great disdain for dis stain you've left on de English language.
--

Using "Scar" to refer to a fresh or recent wound.

I've seen more than my fill of this in HP fan fiction, with authors referring to wounds as scars in the middle of the same fight that caused the wound! FFS, you can't have a scar without the wound already being healed. Until it's healed, it's just a wound. This is basic stuff! It's like they're writing about some bargain basement Wolverine, who heals in seconds, but has the misfortune to be covered with a patchwork of scars.

If someone raked you across the stomach with a cheese grater and you were bleeding out into the sewer grate, you would not have a scar, you'd have a bloody great bloody grater wound bleeding greatly into the bleedin' grate, and your assailant would have a bloody grater.

With the help of a bloody great doctor, your bleeding grater wound would heal, possibly resulting in the formation of fibrous tissue. THEN, and only then, you'd have a scar. A bloody great grater scar. :facepalm

 

The funny thing about distain is that, depending on the sentence, it still might be accurate as distain is an archaic word meaning to dishonor. Of course, it'd be pretty stilted as distain is a transitive verb, so "he looked on her with distain" doesn't work, but "he distained her work" actually works. The sad thing is, it's pretty difficult to know when someone is using it properly.

(Another Pet Peeve)I have the same problem with bemuse. Does the author really mean confused, or is the person actually trying to say amused. Although, to be fair, I have made the same mistake several times.

And still another Pet Peeve of mine is someone correcting something in my writing when I can tell they didn't bother to actually look up what they were saying to make sure they were right. For instance, fain is not a misspelling of feign. The two words literally have nothing to do with each other and by sentence context, it should be clear.

 

My pet peeve of the day is goblin names. I feel like every time I read one it's totally uninspired. We need better names than Ragnok and Riptooth. Gorkil is a better name.

 

Don't hate on Ragnok, bro. It's a totally awesome name.

 

I love the way in the examples of correct use of words you used through rather than threw.

 

Of curse!

(And thanks for the catch, I went back and fixed it. For some reason, that and you're/your are two homophones that I occasionally miss.)

---------- Post automerged at 08:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:40 PM ----------

Another Pet Peeve:

A person who has a desire to go to the lake "wants to go to the lake."

A person who is likely to go to the lake or habitually goes to the lake "is wont to go to the lake."

Completely different words, completely different meanings.

 

Not gonna lie, I'll keep to the past form despite the present one being more correct. The optics on Russ's just offend my aesthetic sensibilities in a major way.

 

The 'Don't like, don't read' thing is understandable. I sometimes get pissed off at reviews that are either flames or borderline-flaming. If someone has to criticise me, I'd far rather they told me something useful. I think though that I've only ever used the DLDR excuse once, and I was tired and irritable at the time.

Goblin names could do with expanding. I vaguely remember naming one of my goblin characters 'Grimblade the Gaunt', simply because I thought it sounded cool.

Now my pet peeve:

Assuming because someone's written a bad story that they are inevitably a stupid human being who is going to end up dying in a sewer, disembowelled with a cheese grater that is now stuffed up their backside. I wrote a few truly terrible, tedious cliched pieces of crap which I am ashamed of. Strangely some people seem to like them. I have tried to mature as a reader and writer, as well as a reviewer.

ElMarquis.

P.S - To Warlocke, I am now going to have to fit into one of my stories someone dying of cheese-grater inflicted wounds. Only a day or three on this forum and you've all corrupted me. I've even written a Kill!Ginny oneshot now!!!

 

"What people don't know is that the Featherlight charm secretly lowers gravity on something, and Incendio heats up molecules."

Can we not overcomplicate Magic? It's becoming a bit odd that a supernatural force that doesn't apply within our frame of logic, is being subverted to our frame of logic. We get that you want to make Magic 'make sense' but to me, it feels like a cop-out, and it takes away the magic of magic.

Next peeve is Duelling.

"Harry shot forward several curses with lightning fast abandon, Voldemort blocked them all with a Protego."

While I can't say Rowling did much of a better job at writing Duelling scenes, there was at least some innovation and use of surroundings. I feel as if the authors are too worried about identifying every single spell that flys out of someone's wand, that they just regress towards only using canon spells, making these people who are literal genius' only use a single type of magic within a duel.

 

Fantasitc Beasts didn't help at all with that. The aurors may as well have been using guns.

 

I've written two kinds of fight scenes. I'll go and grab some quotes from the ones in my oneshots folder.

Exhibit A: Epic Battle:

Exhibit Q: Single Combat:

Which one works better, in close and personal, where each one is fighting spell for spell, or where they are merely a part of a furious melee between innumerable fighters?

ElMarquis.

 

It does take some time getting used to it, however, if you want to publish in anything that follows Chicago Style Manual, it's probably best to try and switch over. Note, however, if you'd rather publish things like newspaper articles, they still follow the older method.

 

So this is a pet peeve of mine that has been slowly building, but I recently read the newest chapter of To Be a Slytherin which has thousands of reviews and hundreds of thousands of words. The story is basically canon. Word for word at so many points. Its already at the end of 6th year, yet every time Harry is on screen the words are directly from the books. The premise of the story is a sister of Harry in Slytherin. And this does change a few things here and there, but the main plot of Harry Potter is word for word from the books. Its just so pointless.

 

I only use the new style of possessives. DON'T LIKE? DON'T READ.

I loathe stories like this. The problem is they always get me. Usually, they have a cool or potentially cool hook and you keep reading to see where it goes. And goes. And goes. Until you get to the end and realise you've read 100k of drivel where literally nothing happened except the teasing suggestion that things could potentially happen. My god those stories are the worst.

The first by far. The second reads a bit like a dry report on the blow-by-blow. The main problem with it is that it's like a list, describing what happened but not the impact or significance of any of it. See, it's fine to be detailed, but that detail has to mean something.

For example, no one cares that the action hero shot the gun six times and is using a steel box for cover. They care that he's one bullet away from running out of ammo, that his ears are ringing from the blast and that he can't see for shit because the blood and sweat from his forehead made it into his eyes. But if he doesn't make this next shot, he'll never see his son again. Will he succeed?

Suspense drives a good action scene. And a good rest of the book, come to think of it. If you don't instill your reader with the fear of how the fight is going to turn out you might as well not write an action scene at all.

The key to achieving your suspense is to stack the scene with consequences, big and small, where everything you write has a knock-on impact. Think with all five senses and this gets surprisingly easy - you conjured a statue to block a killing curse and it shattered. How does it feel to get covered in shrapnel and rubble? Would that injure the character? What gets more difficult now because he's injured? And it just goes from there.

 

I don't know which is worse in such Fics: when they literally copy and paste entire sections of the Books word for word, or when the story is just rewritten Canon with a few bonuses here or there. Because I've sadly seen both done.